# Blameless Postmortems - Examining Failure Without Blame

DevFeed: [Blameless Postmortems - Examining Failure Without Blame](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/blameless-postmortems-examining-failure-without-blame-24951.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://codeahoy.com/2016/06/20/blameless-postmortems-examining-failure-without-blame/>)

Author: umer

Published: 2016-06-20T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Code Ahoy - Articles](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/code-ahoy-articles.md>)

Topics: [Complex Systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/complex-systems.md>), [Resilience](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/resilience.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [site-reliability-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/site-reliability-engineering.md>)

Tags: [complex-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/complex-systems.md>), [management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/management.md>), [mistakes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mistakes.md>), [organizational](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/organizational.md>), [people](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/people.md>), [resilience](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/resilience.md>), [safety](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/safety.md>), [team](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/team.md>)

## AI overview

This commentary argues that organizations should examine failures in complex systems without blaming individuals. It presents blameless postmortems and a Just Culture as ways to encourage employees to share information, understand organizational causes, improve system resilience, and prevent recurring failures.

## Source excerpt

Let's face it: failure is inevitable in complex systems. It cares not for the number of tests you ran, code reviews or your monitoring tools. It just happens. And how is failure usually dealt with? Instead of learning from it to improve the resilience of the system, the traditional view is to assign blame and point fingers at individuals responsible for the failure. It's easier to identify a culprit than to find the real cause. In The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, author Sidney Dekker refers to this as the "old view" that leads us nowhere: When faced with a human error problem, you may be tempted to ask 'Why didn't they watch out better? How could they not have noticed?'. You think you can solve your human error problem by telling people to be more careful, by reprimanding the miscreants, by issuing a new rule or procedure. These are all expressions of 'The Bad Apple Theory', where you believe your system is basically safe if it were not for those few unreliable people in it. This old view of human error is increasingly outdated and will lead you nowhere. The new view, in contrast, understands that a human error problem is actually an organizational problem. When employees are blamed and shamed by their superiors, who have the the power of hindsight on their side, few things happen: Employees become defensive and lose motivation. The overall team sociology and culture suffers. Employees start hiding mistakes. The team and the company doesn't learn any lessons and nothing is done to prevent failures from happening again. No one actually takes the responsibility and everybody blames each other. So how should companies handle mistakes? When failure occurs, the role of the management should be to figure out what happened so they can improve something to prevent it from happening again. But the management doesn't have a crystal ball that can give out all the details. They have to rely on their employees for this information. In order for employees to come for